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Featured in Development

Peter Alvaro talks about the reasons one should engage in language design and why many of us would (or should) do something so perverse as to design a language that no one will ever use. He shares some of the extreme and sometimes obnoxious opinions that guided his design process.

Featured in AI, ML & Data Engineering

Today on The InfoQ Podcast, Wes talks with Katharine Jarmul about privacy and fairness in machine learning algorithms. Jarul discusses what’s meant by Ethical Machine Learning and some things to consider when working towards achieving fairness. Jarmul is the co-founder at KIProtect a machine learning security and privacy firm based in Germany and is one of the three keynote speakers at QCon.ai.

In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Rebecca Parsons, CTO of ThoughtWorks, about their recent report on the need for Courageous Leadership and her forthcoming book on Evolutionary Architecture

Key Takeaways

Courageous leadership enables organisations to solve enterprise-scale problems while still allowing empowered development teams to produce software in an agile fashion

The importance of making the link between technology advances and what they could mean for a business organisation, rather than seeing them in isolation

If your metric is how many experiments succeed then you will not take enough risks – turn this around and celebrate the learning from failed experiments

The need to truly put the customer at the centre our focus, understand the kind of relationship we want with customers and how we want to interact with them

Create an environment where people are recognised and valued for their varied perspectives and recognise that good ideas can come from many different places

Evolutionary architecture is based on the idea that things are changing so rapidly now that you can’t predict what changes will be needed in the future

Innovations around databases, architecture and continuous delivery enable evolutionary architecture to be a real thing today

8:25 This is achieved by presenting a goal, a picture of what the future might be and inviting their people to help them paint that picture together

8:43 Empowering people on their teams to dream, to imagine how the world could be different and creating an environment where people have the space to be creative, the space to take measured risks and sometimes fail, and sometimes “hit a home run”

9:10 An example of Domino’s Pizza as an innovation leader – a technology company who happens to create pizzas

9:25 Ways that Dominos have leveraged technology to create a complete customer experience rather than just order a pizza

9:55 IAG in Australia as an example of a company that has built an environment which allows for experimentation and learning despite being a traditional financial services organisation

13:40 The concept of a Fitness Function – things that need to be explored up front relate to the critical architectural characteristics which will have the biggest impact on the overall system. Examples include security, performance, mean-time-to-recovery.

14:05 You can’t optimize for all of these things – you have to decide which is the most important characteristic and optimize for that

14:25 Drawing on ideas from evolutionary computation and fitness functions

14:35 Some recent innovations have made evolutionary architecture possible

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